The Linux Xonar driver has the EEPROM restoring tool integrated since kernel 2.6.30 (which was released June 2009).<br>Just boot your installed Linux, or any recent Linux live CD.

+

The Linux Xonar driver has a simple version of the EEPROM restoring tool integrated since kernel 2.6.30 (which was released June 2009).<br>Just boot your installed Linux, or any recent Linux live CD.<br>However, this simple version is not able to correct all possible errors.

Contents

Xonar EEPROM Failure

Sometimes, Xonar PCI/PCI-E cards randomly fail to be recognized.

The driver refused to load or to install, and in Device Manager, the card is shown as an unknown sound card or as "C-Media Oxygen audio device".
Putting the card into another slot or another computer does not help.

This happens when the EEPROM on the card gets overwritten.
(This EEPROM stores the PCI subsystem vendor and product IDs;
when it gets overwritten, the main chip cannot read the subsystem IDs
and uses a default ID (13F6:8788) which is not recognized by the Xonar driver.)

To reliably detect whether the EEPROM was overwritten,
go into Device Manager, show the properties page of the device,
go to the "Details" tab, and select the property "Hardware IDs",
and look at the values after "SUBSYS_":

Causes

The exact cause is unknown.
It seems that the problem occurs only with certain computers or motherboards,
and after booting from a CD (i.e., (re)installation of an operating system, or using a live CD).

Restoring the EEPROM

I have written a tool that can restore the original contents of the EEPROM.
It needs direct access to the hardware, therefore, it can not be run inside Windows.

In DOS

If you have a working DOS, you can use this method. (This tool is run in the same way as Asus' xee01.bat.)

Booting from a USB memory stick/flash disk

Booting Linux

The Linux Xonar driver has a simple version of the EEPROM restoring tool integrated since kernel 2.6.30 (which was released June 2009).Just boot your installed Linux, or any recent Linux live CD.However, this simple version is not able to correct all possible errors.